Research Article

Numerical simulation of heat sinks with different configurations for high power LED thermal management

¹ Department of Mechanical Engineering, Vel Tech Rangarajan Dr. Sagunthala R&D Institute of Science and Technology, Chennai 600062, Tamil Nadu, India
² Clean Energy Research Group, Department of Mechanical and Aeronautical Engineering, University of Pretoria, Pretoria 0002, South Africa

^* e-mail: drsalunkhesachin@veltech.edu.in

Received: 16 March 2022
Accepted: 8 June 2022

Abstract

This study performed a steady-state numerical analysis to understand the temperature in different heat sink configurations for LED applications. Seven heat sink configurations named R, H-6, H-8, H-10, C, C3, and C3E3 were considered. Parameters like input power, number of fins, heat sink configuration were varied, and their influence on LED temperature distribution, heat sink thermal resistance and thermal interface material temperature were studied. The results showed that the temperature distribution of the H-6 heat sink decreased by 46.30% compared with the Cheat sink for an input power of 16 W. The result of the H-6 heat sink shows that the heat sink thermal resistance was decreased by 73.91% compared with the Cheat sink at 16 W. The lowest interface material temperature of 54.11 °C was achieved by the H-6 heat sink when the input power was used 16 W. The H-6 heat sink exhibited better performance due to more surface area with several fins than other heat sinks.